Techdirt. Stories filed under "manipulation"Easily digestible tech news...https://www.techdirt.com/
en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "manipulation"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Fri, 16 Nov 2012 10:35:56 PSTNaked Scanner Maker Accused Of Manipulating Tests To Make Scans Look Less InvasiveMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121115/17082521070/naked-scanner-maker-accused-manipulating-tests-to-make-scans-look-less-invasive.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121115/17082521070/naked-scanner-maker-accused-manipulating-tests-to-make-scans-look-less-invasive.shtmlretrofitting the various naked scanners or moving on to less privacy invasive versions, but there were two interesting points to come out some Congressional hearings on the devices yesterday. First, apparently there is some concern that the makers of the Rapiscan machine (and, yes, it still amazes me that anyone thought that was a good name), OSI Systems, may have "manipulated" tests in order to claim that the machines did not invade travelers' privacy:

The company “may have attempted to defraud the government by knowingly manipulating an operational test,” Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Transportation Security Subcommittee, said in a letter to Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole Nov. 13. Rogers said his committee received a tip about the faked tests.

OSI, of course, is denying it, but this is the same company that also apparently ran into problems last year when maintenance reports suggested radiation levels 10 times as high as promised.

While it's a good thing that privacy violating machines aren't being used, it raises serious questions about why they were purchased and put into use in the first place -- and done so without ever taking comment from the public, as is required under law. Perhaps if they had actually done that, they would have avoided wasting so much taxpayer money on machines that violate everyone's privacy.

"When someone has a really high ad click probability, they're very hard to beat, so it's not a really competitive auction," McAfee told The Reg. "So that they don't just win [every auction], we do squashing. This makes the auction more competitive.

"It's like handicapping. We handicap the people with the high click probability."

This, McAfee said, can increase Yahoo!'s revenues. "The bidders respond by bidding higher. The one who was destined to lose is now back in the race, so they bid higher trying to displace the number one, and the number one is trying to fend them off so they bid higher too.

"We can make the competition a bit more fierce using squashing, even on keywords where there's not much bidding."

While that may seem like a neat trick from an economics standpoint, it certainly seems like a pretty questionable business practice from an advertisers' standpoint. Having a company secretly manipulate the results of an auction to make participants pay more? That sounds like fraud. As Eric Goldman notes, this appears to be a lawsuit waiting to happen.